calculate light transmission of point cloud

[wiesehahn]

Coming from raw lidar pointcloud data, whats the best way to render the shades?

(The use case I have in mind is to calculate and render sun energy in a forest which is falling on the ground in canopy gaps or penetrating through the canopy)

1. I guess the standard way would be to rasterize the the pointcloud (e.g. create a digital surface model) and then use it within rayshader.

2. Another option I could imagine would be to create a mesh (or object?) and feed it to rayrender.
   (Is this even possible and if yes what's the technical advantages/disadvantages?)

Disadvantages of methods 1 and 2 are certainly that only part of the data (e.g. highest points) is used to create the surface which is then "solid" and does not account for point density. If I understand it correctly this surface then either permits no light transmission (rayshader) or a fixed amount (material properties in rayrender).
Basically the lidar pointcloud is a direct measure for for the transmission of light (in a certain direction) which is not used with methods 1 and 2.
Hence, I was also thinking about using every single point as an object with certain size.
Would it be (computationally) possible to render a scene with a large amount of points (as e.g. spheres) to compute the light transmission, and does it make sense?